مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد مطالعه موردی در طراحی شهری اولیه – تیلور و فرانسیس ۲۰۱۸

The definition of urban design, one leading analyst has written, remains ‘elusive’, ۱ an observation one must bear in mind when exploring the profession’s history. The central cause of this surely is its relationship to urban planning, and to some extent architecture, with both of which it shares certain elements while also being fundamentally distinct. Some have gone so far as to characterize urban design not as a discrete discipline but simply as a ‘way of thinking’ that can inform the practice of architecture or planning,2 an appealing compromise that obviates the need for a precise definition; yet something as amorphous as a ‘way of thinking’ rarely forms the basis for concrete things like university programmes, scholarly journals, or professional associations – which urban design does. Then there is the complication of when the profession emerged: some of what is now considered urban design was in fact being done, right through to the early twentieth century, by practitioners we call early urban planners. 3 ‘Elusive’ does indeed seem to be the right word. Yet one soon realizes that, for better or worse, most present-day analysts of the profession have set aside this definitional/historical problem, and when commenting on urban design – though they may glance back to nineteenth-century ‘Historical Precedents’ ۴ – they are referring quite unambiguously to a particular approach to creating and enhancing urban spaces that emerged in the 1950s. Eric Mumford provides its foundational narrative: urban design was conceived at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design primarily by Josep Lluis Sert, whose central role, Mumford contends, reveals the discipline’s ties to European modernism. Sert envisioned the new profession as an amalgam of planning, architecture, and landscape architecture.5 Its scope was the city, not the suburbs, and it was thus something of a reaction, or at least a counterpoise, to America’s postwar rush to the suburbs. Its métier was physical design, in the architect’s three dimensions not the planner’s two, but of urban environments not individual buildings, and it thus paid particular attention to relationships between buildings and to the spaces around them. Others see things slightly differently – Peter Laurence portrays it as a reaction to destructive urban renewal6 – but this account of the profession’s emergence is generally accepted. The study presented here makes no effort to challenge this account and in fact uses it as a premise, in a sense. What follows is a study of a small group of urban designers who practised in Toronto from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, making them, according to this narrative, the first generation of working urban designers. They are not among the profession’s creators, so this is not a study of the profession’s genesis, per se, but they are among its first practitioners and the study examines them and their work with this in mind. What professional training did they receive? What did they call themselves? What was their relationship to planning, and to architecture? What principles informed and guided their work? Where did these ideas originate and how did they come to Toronto? And what, all told, might the answers to these questions contribute to our understanding of the emergence of present-day urban design?